So How Did They Catch Those U.K. Airplane Bomb Plotters, Anyway?
There's a lot of the story still developing, of course, but it looks like there was some -- gasp! -- telephone serveillance going on:
A senior Pakistani security official said the arrest of Rashid Rauf, a British citizen, was followed within days by a telephone call from someone in Pakistan urging the British plotters to execute their plan.(HT: Called As Seen.)
"This telephone call intercept in Karachi and the arrest of Rashid Rauf helped a lot to foil the terror plan," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Then there's this:
Last night US officials told reporters that substantial sums of money had been wired from Pakistan to two of the alleged ringleaders in Britain, so that they could purchase airline tickets.Oh, dear, it looks like financial transactions were being monitored through that awful SWIFT system. Doesn't this make you want to get together with someone you love and pray for the future of civil liberties in this country?
posted by Lowell Brown at 11:15 PM
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1 Comments:
Hedge, you correctly point out that telephone surveillance and tracking bank transactions were both critical in foiling this plot. If I'm not mistaken, you are trying to make a point that if we pointed-headed liberals were in charge that perhaps this marvelous outcome would have been, in stead, tragic.
But you are conflating the issue.
The point of the criticism of Pres. Bush's unilateral, extra legal programs is that they were quite possibly against the law of the United States. The actions conducted by the UK intelligence and police were in accord with UK law.
One more comment on the UK success -- it came about through police action. The bad guys have been arrested, are no longer an immediate threat, will face trial and probably long prison terms. Remember John Kerry suggesting that a major aspect of the war on terror involved police action? He was loudly criticized for that statement, and characterized as 'weak' on terrorists and unable to tell the difference between crime and war.
Well, thank God police actions worked this time.
Posted by Scott
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